I guess I thought my points about total utilitarianism were relevant, because âwe can make people like us more by pushing back more against misrepresentationâ is only true insofar as the real views we have will not offend people. Iâm also just generically anxious about people in EA believing things that feel scary to me. (As I say, Iâm not actually against people correcting misrepresentations obviously.)
I donât really have much sense of how reasonable critics are or arenât being, beyond the claim that sometimes they touch on genuinely scary things about total utilitarianism, and that itâs a bit of a problem that the main group arguing for AI safety contains a lot of prominent people with views that (theoretically) imply that we should be prepared to take big chances of AI catastrophe rather than pass up small chances of lots of v. happy digital people.
On Torres specifically: I donât really follow them in detail (these topics make me anxious), but I didnât intend to be claiming that they are a fair or measured critic, just that they have decent technical understanding of the philosophical issues involved and sometimes puts their finger on real weaknesses. That is compatible with them also saying a lot of stuff thatâs just false. I think motivated reasoning is a more likely explanation for why they says false things than conscious lying, but thatâs just because thatâs my prior about most people. (Edit: Actually, Iâm a little less sure of that, after being reminded of the sockpuppetry allegations by quinn below. If those are true, that is deliberate dishonesty.)
Regarding Gebru calling Will a eugenicist. Well, I really doubt you could âsueâ over that, or demonstrate to the people most concerned about this that he doesnât count as one by any reasonable definition. Some people use âeugenicistâ for any preference that a non-disabled person comes into existence rather than a different disabled person. And Will does have that preference. In What We Owe the Future, he takes it as obvious that if you have a medical condition that means if you conceive right now, your child will have awful painful migraines, then you should wait a few weeks to conceive so that you have a different child who doesnât have migraines. I think plenty ordinary people would be fine with that and puzzled by Gebru-like reactions, but it probably does meet some literal definitions that have been given for âeugenicsâ. Just suggesting he is a âeugenicistâ without further clarification is nonetheless misleading and unfair in my view, but thatâs not quite what libel is. Certainly I have met philosophers with strong disability rights views who regard Willâs kind of reaction to the migraine case as bigoted. (Not endorsing that view myself.)
None of this is some kind of overall endorsement of how the âAI ethicsâ crowd on Twitter talk overall, or about EAs specifically. I havenât been much exposed to it, and when I have been, I generally havenât liked it.
I guess I thought my points about total utilitarianism were relevant, because âwe can make people like us more by pushing back more against misrepresentationâ is only true insofar as the real views we have will not offend people. Iâm also just generically anxious about people in EA believing things that feel scary to me. (As I say, Iâm not actually against people correcting misrepresentations obviously.)
I donât really have much sense of how reasonable critics are or arenât being, beyond the claim that sometimes they touch on genuinely scary things about total utilitarianism, and that itâs a bit of a problem that the main group arguing for AI safety contains a lot of prominent people with views that (theoretically) imply that we should be prepared to take big chances of AI catastrophe rather than pass up small chances of lots of v. happy digital people.
On Torres specifically: I donât really follow them in detail (these topics make me anxious), but I didnât intend to be claiming that they are a fair or measured critic, just that they have decent technical understanding of the philosophical issues involved and sometimes puts their finger on real weaknesses. That is compatible with them also saying a lot of stuff thatâs just false. I think motivated reasoning is a more likely explanation for why they says false things than conscious lying, but thatâs just because thatâs my prior about most people. (Edit: Actually, Iâm a little less sure of that, after being reminded of the sockpuppetry allegations by quinn below. If those are true, that is deliberate dishonesty.)
Regarding Gebru calling Will a eugenicist. Well, I really doubt you could âsueâ over that, or demonstrate to the people most concerned about this that he doesnât count as one by any reasonable definition. Some people use âeugenicistâ for any preference that a non-disabled person comes into existence rather than a different disabled person. And Will does have that preference. In What We Owe the Future, he takes it as obvious that if you have a medical condition that means if you conceive right now, your child will have awful painful migraines, then you should wait a few weeks to conceive so that you have a different child who doesnât have migraines. I think plenty ordinary people would be fine with that and puzzled by Gebru-like reactions, but it probably does meet some literal definitions that have been given for âeugenicsâ. Just suggesting he is a âeugenicistâ without further clarification is nonetheless misleading and unfair in my view, but thatâs not quite what libel is. Certainly I have met philosophers with strong disability rights views who regard Willâs kind of reaction to the migraine case as bigoted. (Not endorsing that view myself.)
None of this is some kind of overall endorsement of how the âAI ethicsâ crowd on Twitter talk overall, or about EAs specifically. I havenât been much exposed to it, and when I have been, I generally havenât liked it.